A crime that stays with you

It is a question that must be asked. I have asked it so many times in print that I have lost count.

How do you run over a 7-year-old girl not once, but twice, and simply disappear, leaving her, for all you know, to die in the street?

Do you just go home, sit down to dinner, watch a little television and turn in for the night? And what of the next day, or the one that follows or the weeks to come?

I have been here a little more than a month now. Rare has been the day, or at least it seems, that a motorist does not hit a pedestrian and flee the scene. I have been printing out each new story. I now have a stack of them.

The one that riles – no, makes my blood boil – is the Dec. 5 hit-and-run involving Evelyn Sanchez. She is 7.

Her mother, Melitza Jimenez, was moving Evelyn and her four siblings into their new Santa Ana apartment. She was unloading items from the back of her car when Evelyn, for whatever reason, darted into the 400 block of South Birch Street.

A dark-colored SUV traveling at about 30 mph struck the girl and dragged her about 15 yards. A black-and-white surveillance video of the area captured the SUV's brake lights come on briefly before the driver sped up and disappeared down the road.

“It was an accident,” Melitza Jimenez told the Register the following day. “What hurts is that (the driver) didn't stop.”

I spoke with Santa Ana Police Department spokesman Cpl. Anthony Bertagna to see whether they were at all close to an arrest in the case. The little girl remained at Western Medical Center, where she has undergone two surgeries for injuries to her head and body.

“We have leads,” Bertagna said, “but nothing to the point where we are near to making an arrest.” And then he grew quiet for a long moment. “How anyone can just leave a 7-year-old child in the middle of the street to die is beyond me.”

He began his list of the hit-and-runs that have affected him the most. I told him I have the newspaper accounts of them on my desk.

Police officers, I have discovered – the same men and women who can speak so dispassionately about even a murder – get downright angry when discussing hit-and-run drivers. It is the few times they will swear in an interview.

I have since come to believe it is all about the sheer wantonness of the act, the wholesale victimization it causes, not only of the dead or badly injured, but of their families.

It is the rare hit-and-run, I have also discovered, that gets solved. And when that occurs, police officers become almost giddy with joy.

I will not say Sgt. Cameron Knauerhaze, Westminster Police Department spokesman, was giddy when I spoke with him the other day about an arrest officers made in a late November fatal hit-and-run. It was close, though.

Brennan Soit, 24, was found lying on Beach Boulevard south of 23rd Street, where he soon would die from multiple injuries. Knauerhaze and other officers, beginning that night, bombarded the media with requests for the public's help in tracking down a late-model Toyota RAV4. Debris left in the street told officers the make and model of the vehicle that had killed Soit and fled.

Two days later, a 44-year-old man came to the Westminster police front counter and identified himself as the driver. He was then arrested and charged with felony hit-and-run involving death and vehicular manslaughter.

“The media played a tremendous factor in that case,” Knauerhaze later said, adding he had never before seen in his 16 years of police work a hit-and-run driver turn himself in.

In the Soit case, he said it was involving the media that made the difference.

“People see their vehicle on TV,” he said, “they see us knocking on doors and start to believe we're closing in on them. People say, ‘OK, you got me.' ”

Each and every hit-and-run is horrific, yet Bertagna of Santa Ana P.D. tells me of one that is not in my stack.

It happened last June when a woman and her two young daughters made their way through a crosswalk at 17th and Spurgeon streets on their way to breakfast.

A Lexus never stopped for the red light and barreled into Eloisa Magana, 45, and her daughters, Osmara, 5, and Grecia Meza, 6. Osmara was killed instantly. Her mother and sister were severely injured.

A witness, Beatriz Jimenez, followed the Lexus in her Honda Civic for two blocks before managing to cut off the Lexus and hold the driver until police arrived.

The woman and her surviving daughter only recently were discharged from the hospital. Jorge Omar Meza, Osmara's father, lost his job to care for his wife and daughter.

Remember what I told you about police officers and hit-and-run victims?

“We want to give that family a good Christmas,” Bertagna said.

The department – through the Santa Ana Police Department Foundation, a nonprofit – is seeking toys and other items for the family. It plans to present gifts to them at 10 a.m. Thursday.

“We just started working on it, but a lot of the guys here … well, we just want to do it for them.”

Others wishing to help out the family too, Bertagna said, may contact the foundation at 714-972-0200.

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